This site gets about 153,000 visits and 748,000 hits per month, including those people that return. The majority of requests landing on the site are directed towards the home page, the picks page or individual wines, suggesting that people are interested in looking up specific bottles. Weekends are generally 10% busier than weekdays. For weekdays, there’s usually a peak of visitors around 10am to 11am and then from 4pm until 11pm.

Technical – Understanding hits and visitors

A hit is the fetching of a single file. An article usually consists of several files such as the text (html) and some images.

A visitor is defined in web statistics as a unique IP address. This approach sometimes understates the true number of people visiting a site. While individual consumers at home typically appear under a unique IP, this is not true in offices and other business settings, where many users can share a single IP address and therefore be counted as just one visitor. In addition, some residential cable providers are starting to use technologies, like CGNAT used by my Internet service provider, that allow several nearby households to share the same IP address, which further reduces the apparent number of visitors in the statistics.

Counting unique IP addresses also overstates the true number of human visitors because automated systems regularly crawl sites. However the ratio of bot’s IP addresses to human IP addresses is lower on a site such as winedrinker, that has lots of traffic. Analysis of the winedrinker web logs show that search and discovery crawlers such as Googlebot, bingbot, Applebot, Amazonbot, YandexBot and DuckDuckBot visit the site. There are also AI-related crawlers and fetchers including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the ChatGPT-User agent. This means my content and wine recommendations are being surfaced in AI, often with links.